


A Helping Hand of Bone

by Lord_Martin_of_Fail_Mountain



Category: Diablo III
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-28 00:24:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13259724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lord_Martin_of_Fail_Mountain/pseuds/Lord_Martin_of_Fail_Mountain
Summary: Rumford, a farmer, recently made Captain, has gotten the task of leading New Tristram's militia, protecting the town from the droves of undead that rose in the countryside after a star fell from the sky. Tonight, he meets the hero who would save the world.Introduction to the Necromancer





	A Helping Hand of Bone

All that grows must also wither and die. There was a cycle to things, an order to the world. That much was true. But the death surrounding the star’s fall was not natural.

Rumford stared across the road to the hacked-up corpses that lined the shrubs, and the town gate and the night’s watchmen behind him. Militiamen he was supposed to lead.

To his right and left, in the spiked ditches lay more dead, filling the foggy air with a stench that found its way into everything, palpable and heavy with the buzzing of flies. Corpses were lying on the road itself as well, some face down, some staring up at the milky moon with empty eye sockets. Some were barely more than skeletons, with dirty, shriveled brown skin. Some, like the young boy Rumford took care not to look at, was bloodied and bruised but recognizable, with a full head of blond hair that glinted in the torchlight not far from his body.

He sighed, and so did one of the men behind him. A mere four people were with him, against droves of risen dead. His head hurt in the ill-fitting iron helmet, and sweat was trickling down his brow. His sword was smeared with the muddy remains of fighting.

He sniffed. There were more coming. The tar-like blackness of the night was held at bay by the torches burning on the low wooden walls, but after a good fifty paces, beyond the bushes and trees, there were the Tristram plains. He knew the area, but these days it was as if he was not at home anymore. Behind the tentative glow there were voices, some far, some closer, none of them heartening. Voices of men and women, but lacking sense. Gurgles, moans and hisses. Hundreds of voices. It made every hair on Rumford’s arm stand up and itch under the wool of his coat.

To the far left side was the barricade which so far kept a good number of the walking dead from shambling in from Old Tristram Road. Rumford did his best not to glance there either. He tried to not focus on recent memories at all, but it was a nigh impossible task when he could hear the unnatural “life” of the night from just outside what he and his men were able to see.

The town was quiet at least. Maybe some people there could get some sleep, but Rumford knew some folks who would still be up. The inn would be open, surely. The blacksmith would hardly sleep, with everything that happened. Others, kept up by fear, unease, grief. New Tristram never shut its eyes.

To the right rose the road which was lined with scarce wooden lantern posts, hugging the settlement’s side. Travelers would see across the rooftops coming from there, but hardly anyone did nowadays. But at that moment, there came a sound from behind the trees and beyond the broken carts and debris. It wasn’t like the sound of the risen approaching.

“What was that?” the man on Rumford’s left – a farmer, like him – asked quietly, nocking an arrow.

“I don’t know,” said the other militiaman, barely a man by his age – a cooper’s apprentice.

The sentries on the wall called down to them.

“Did you hear something?”

“I’ll check, just… stay here,” Rumford said and took a few steps forward, leaning forward to look down the winding dirt path.

That was when he heard the snarl, right in front of him.

“Look out!” the cooper’s boy yelped, and Rumford snapped back from the scratching hand of a gray-skinned, half naked undead. Behind it, others were crawling out of the tree line.

“Captain!” the young man called out, and Rumford ducked to the left. The guards released their arrows, and two of them hit his attacker in the chest,  _ thud-thud _ . One of the shots went far into a tree, rustling the leaves, and another buried itself in a corpse that just reared its jawless head.

“Protect the town!” Rumford shouted the obvious. He drew his sword and hacked at a fresh, moaning undead, a man with a shirt soaked in blood. The blade hits its shoulder, going deep like a cleaver, and he had to wrench it out while another one of these wretched things lunged for him lazily. He freed his sword and stepped back. If nothing else, he was faster than them. Just don’t get surrounded.

Another four arrows were let fly, one hitting the ground but three finding their mark. The first corpse to appear was riddled with them now. Rumford attacked this one, aiming more carefully now, and managing to hack off its head from its rotten neck. The creature raised its hands, headless, and Rumford kicked it away. When it fell onto its back with a sickly squish, it stopped moving.

Legless torsos crawled from the shrubs, pulling entrails behind them. The ones on their feet were swaying, some twitching, some faster. One of them was bloated and tall. One had a chewed off left arm. They all gargled and grumbled and moaned, frighteningly human.

Rumford ran one through with his sword, the metal scraping across bones. Another volley of arrows thunked off the bowstrings, and one shriveled carcass was hit in the middle of the head, going down. The captain yanked his sword clear, beheaded the creature in front of him, then lashed out with a kick against a crawler’s temple. It didn’t quite stop moving, its dirty nails scraping in the dirt. The militiamen were shouting. The farmer tossed his bow back and pulled his sword to meet the assault on Rumford’s side.

“It’s only a few of them!” he said.

“Don’t let them reach the wall!” Rumford yelled. He felt a hand grab his armored shoulder and he shrugged it off, cutting down the undead that got close. He stomped on the head of the crawling torso in front of him, hearing it crack and crunch under his boot.

He felt a rumble in the earth, making him jump. His comrade beside him gasped. Ahead, on the road,  _ spikes  _ of bone burst from the ground with a spray of dust, impaling three of the risen dead. The serrated white bone spears crunched through their bodies and lifted them in the air before they got sucked back into the ground violently, slamming creatures back down. Limbs and a head tore off, falling further away.

“What was that!” one of the wall sentries shouted.

Rumford’s eyes were wide and he stepped back. Another spear of bone – it was certainly bone – flew from the right, impaling two of the corpses at once and yanking them away from in front of him. He was flabbergasted, standing with his feet rooted to the ground.

Another lance of bone whizzed past and drove a creature into the dirt like an arrow would a rabbit. Only the tallest, barrel-chested undead remained whose face was streaked with bloody nail-marks. Rumford was pretty sure this was the body of a friend’s father. It came at them with a broken leg, mouth hanging open.

When Rumford woke from his paralyzing surprise and lifted his sword, the risen man stopped and started convulsing. Brownish red dots appeared on its rotten skin which burst open, its half-clotted blood pouring out. And it poured into a swirling line, like a beam, which headed to the right. Everyone yelled out in fearful shock.

The line of blood flew above the road, into the gesticulating hands of a white-haired stranger. The blood swirled magically, levitated by the tall man’s ever-moving fingertips.

“Step back,” an authoritative, purring voice said to the guards. They complied.

The large corpse in front of them exploded like a melon hit by a heavy maul. Pieces of entrails, bone, skin, sinew, muscle sprayed everywhere in a mist of blood. Rumford did not have the chance to cover his face before it hit him. He cried out in fright.

Then, there were no more undead.

Nobody threatened the stranger as he walked down the road. Not the blood-sprayed Rumford and the farmer next to him, not the cooper’s apprentice, not the guards standing behind the wall with their bows.

The man was as tall as Rumford – and he was taller than anyone in the militia. He had straight, white hair that fell to his bony shoulders. His skin was the palest Rumford ever saw, his chest bare in a loose black shirt. His face looked… old. Worn. But the cold blue eyes that looked at him did not look like an old man’s, however deep-set they were.

“I have come to aid these lands,” he said. “Where is the fallen star?”

Rumford blinked, his mouth hanging open. He looked at the man next to him, then turned back at the others. He got clueless, wide stares from all of them. He turned back to the stranger, who was still standing there, not taking his eyes off him. His stare was unsettling.

“It fell on the old cathedral,” the captain said, compelled, swallowing like a caught-out child. The undead were not silent. It sounded like they were still coming from the fields. A horde heading their way – they always knew where to go.

The man in front of him nodded. There was a battle sickle in his slender hand. Rumford in his armored mail was twice his width, and yet he was the one being embarrassed in his presence. He was only a farmer a few days ago. “There was only one survivor,” he said as the girl came into his mind. “Leah. You should speak with her.”

Before the man could answer, the young apprentice called out.

“Captain Rumford! More dead are coming!”

He was right. Dozens of them were shambling into view, more nightmarish faces, decayed snarls, sickly eyes and empty sockets. Rumford looked into the eyes of the stranger for one small moment.

“We can’t open the gates until we drive them back!” he said, half pleading. This was a proper attack, not like the few they dispatched moments ago. The brunt of their force.

Arrows were nocked and fired from the wall, and the sentries were pulling the next ones when the stranger turned around slowly. Rumford and his comrade lifted his sword, and so did the young one who set aside his bow. There was no place for cowardice. They met the undead in the middle of the road.

Rumford buried his blade into a lump of rotten flesh and saw the stranger beside him take two determined steps toward a large group coming from the trees. The first one reached the man, and he moved fast, cutting the creature’s chest open with that sickle of his, which must have been sharper than any old weapon here. But then Rumford’s chest heaved again in shock – a scythe-like blade, conjured from the ether, followed the weapon’s swing in a giant arc. There was a sound of metal cutting through everything in its path, and the undead were sliced apart in the line of the spectral scythe. Heads flew off to land in the dirt, and the taller ones were cut in half at the shoulders, arms and torsos and bones carved off.

The stranger shifted to the right and did another swing with his weapon, outwards. Again, with a whooshing sound, the arc was widened unnaturally, and more undead were destroyed in a blink of an eye.

Then the creatures reached Rumford and the men he was supposed to lead, and he tore his eyes away to focus. He chopped a head off and kicked another walking corpse away. Arrows flew over his head into the trees, finding their targets.

“They keep coming!” one of the guards bellowed on the wall.

The apprentice on Rumford’s left brought his sword downwards like an axe and lodged it into a head. He was shouting nothing in particular. The farmer on the captain’s other side thrust and cut and stepped back from an attack. Rumford himself punched a weak-looking skeletal figure with his mail-clad hand and felt the face cave in, then swung his sword against one of the bloated ones that looked like it came from a river. Its skin gave way like paper and its pale muscles popped out of the wound. Rumford hacked at it again, and this time its shoulder-bone stopped the blade.

Another risen monstrosity grabbed his arm with surprising force. Rumford snarled and tried to break away. The big one in front of him set its milky eyes on him and grabbed at him with its fat fingers as well. Then he was let go as one of the stranger’s conjured bone spears drove both of them through their heads, tearing them off their necks. Rumford jumped back from the collapsing bodies.

The white-haired man started swirling his hands again and they watched as the spell took effect. The pile of unmoving corpses at the stranger’s feet convulsed and their chests blew apart, broken-off ribs and cracked bones being torn forcefully from the bodies. The bones flew as if they were knives being thrown, peppering the undead on the left side, knocking them down, tearing them apart.

This man wielded dead bodies as weapons. Rumford kept himself from screaming.

The man threw his sickle, which flew across the air in front of the captain and lodged itself in the chest of a big one farther away from everyone. The stranger made a gesture, switching his outstretched right arm to point with his left one, and the corpse with the weapon exploded, sending the ones around it flying back towards the fields, out of sight. A spray of blood and disgusting mud remained there on the road, and the sickle was flying in the air. The man anticipated its fall and stepped into a group of approaching undead to catch it. When he did, he snarled and twirled to strike with the blade, and another one of those haunting, unnatural scythe-strikes sliced across them. It was a slaughter.

More than fifty corpses lay on the road now. One of the sentries threw a spare lantern, and it caught one of the creatures on fire. The puddle of oil burned on the ground like a candle. The guards fought on, the arrows felling a few, and the captain with the two on the ground doing their best, sweating, tiring, wheezing and shouting.

What Rumford saw next actually made him cry out.

The tall stranger walked at the treeline, and raised his hands to the air. Behind him, some of the crumbled bodies shifted. Rattling and crunching could be heard from the shaking bodies, and suspended in the air, skeletons formed with spears of bone in their hands. The militia backed away to the gate.

Five skeletons stood on the road now in the piles of now boneless bodies. They were white, with bits of dirt and sinew and cloth. And they did not face Rumford and his men. Instead, they charged the obscured fields beyond the light of the torches and lanterns, the man commanding them.

Sounds of battle were reaching them, but there was nothing they could see from it. Thuds, cracks, moans and groans cut short. Noises of violent strikes and the destruction. The man at the side of the road turned around and walked back to the middle. He was looking at Rumford again, whose hand was white on the hilt of his sword.

“The risen dead have been put to rest again,” the stranger said, his voice carrying over the carnage in the darkness behind him.

“Who are you?” the farmer beside Rumford asked, panting.

Then there was suddenly silence. It was over.

The stranger’s skeletons returned, standing in a line behind him. The man did not look at them. After a pause, with the militiamen staring at him, the white army collapsed, crumbling into the bones they were animated from in a cacophony of loud clattering, the magic leaving them. They were nothing more than a pile of human debris now.

Silence again. Only crickets and the whisper of leaves.

The death mage walked closer, his leather boots creaking. He rolled his shoulders and popped his neck.

“You have nothing to fear from me,” he addressed the guards. “I have come to help you, seeking the fallen star. The Cycle should be upheld.”

The cycle of nature? Life and death? Rumford swallowed and nodded.

“I’ve never seen anyone fight like that before,” he said. The man tilted his head somewhat, and what seemed like a small smile crept onto his rather ghastly face. Rumford blinked, then turned around. “Guards, open the gates!” he shouted to the sentries. They hesitated for a moment, then nodded and disappeared behind the wall.

He turned back to the stranger. If he was to help with the star that fell from the sky, raising the dead from their graves and infecting the living, Deckard Cain’s niece would be the one to talk to. She saw what happened first-hand.

“You’ll find Leah at the Slaughtered Calf Inn,” he said as the bolts and latches were opened and the gates swung open behind him.

“I thank you,” the man said with a nod. He then walked past him, stepping lightly, leaving the guards staring at the mess of torn-apart corpses on the dirt road. There was no sign of more coming – for now.

He exhaled, and chewed on his lip. He sniffed once.

“Bring the cart,” he said to the others. “We need to burn them before sunrise.”


End file.
